A transcript is a retrospective written record of dialogue, and like a script (a prospective record) may include other scene information such as props or actions. In the case of a transcript of a film or television episode, ideally it is a verbatim record. Because closed-captioning is usually written separately, its text may have errors and does not necessarily reflect the true Canonical transcript.

Transcripts for Lost episodes up to and including "Enter 77" are based on the transcriptions by Lost-TV member Spooky with aid of DVR, and at times, closed captions for clarification. She and Lost-TV have generously granted us permission to share/host these transcripts at Lostpedia. Later transcripts were created by the Lostpedia community, unless stated otherwise below.

Disclaimer: This transcript is intended for educational and promotional purposes only, and may not be reproduced commercially without permission from ABC. The description contained herein represents viewers' secondhand experience of ABC's Lost.

[opening Lost theme]

Kris White: Welcome to the Official Lost Podcast. In this installment, we join executive producers Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse for more exclusive clues and a preview of the upcoming episode, "The Hunting Party," which airs this Wednesday, January 18th from 9 to 10pm Eastern on ABC. But first up, part one of an interview with actor Harold Perrineau, who plays Michael, a father obsessed with recovering his kidnapped son from the mysterious Others.

[soundtrack music]

Kris White: On the Island, Harold Perrineau's character Michael has had a string of bad luck. First, he lost custody of his son, got hit by a car, and then finally regained custody only to crash land on an island and have him kidnapped by the Others. Harold Perrineau's fortunes, on the other hand, are decidedly better. Starting in the stage production of Topdog/Underdog, Perrineau found success through a string of notable appearances, including The Matrix Reloaded and its sequel. Of course, going from one project steeped in mythology to another isn't without its effects, but for Harold, it just may work.

Harold Perrineau: It actually makes sense for the type of person that I am, where I'm always sort of looking at the mythology of my own life and like questioning things and doing stuff like that, so to be part of these things where you actually look at this mythology and you kind of question like what's going on or how do you respond or what does that mean? Is this real? Is it not? Are we in the matrix? Is- are w- Is this real life? Is real life- my real life, your real life? This actually- those are themes in my own life, like constant things in my life, so it feels like it's running right in accord with exactly who I am, and as I evolve and learn more about myself, that's exactly what's often happening to the characters in some of the work that I've been doing, and I've actually just started noticing that more recently, and so I like it because it keeps me on this same journey and so that I don't ever feel like I'm just settled in my life and like whatever I've got, that's it. And I'm always sort of evolving and moving forward and learning more and taking more in and just not being static. Sometimes, I find myself like asking these really heavy questions, and then I go talk to like somebody like the Wachowski brothers, who are so steeped in like, you know, have such a huge knowledge of like mythology and sort of these philosophers, and then I realize that I don't know anything, [laughs] and like these guys are so so smart, and J.J. Abrams and Damon, they're so so smart, and they have such like really interesting knowle- backgrounds that they pull from and (???) to write these characters.

[clip of Michael asking Locke about the blast doors in "What Kate Did"]

Harold Perrineau: I guess the thing that's hardest to capture for me as an actor on the show is, you know, we've all become good friends, and the sets become a really comfortable place for us to be, so sometimes the toughest thing is to keep up the amount of tension that's there. Like for us, it's now been almost two years, and in the show, it's only been a month- a little over a month. And so to keep that fresh kind of tension, like how new everything is, how different, like to keep remembering that it's been a sort of tough thing, you know, after we go out on the raft and then come back, really that's only like a week, between the time we go out on the raft and come back and we find the hatch, that's really only been a week in the life on the show. But for us, it's been a hiatus and, you know, new things and kids being born, family, and marriages and- you know what I mean? So to keep that kind of tension has been sort of tough. I have to keep reminding myself, this hatch, we've never seen this hatch, the Island is really really weird and like how stran- like and are we still in that place of what the hell is going on? Like that's been sort of the hardest thing to capture.

Kris White: Of course, working on Lost isn't all philosophy. A lot of it is also physical, like the early rivalry between Michael and Jin, played by Daniel Dae Kim. But while their two characters on screen were still making up, Harold and Daniel Dae Kim had already found a common ground.

Harold Perrineau: My first thought was that we were going to be forever like fighting each other because I actually thought that Michael and Sun were gonna somehow get together. He was so mean to her. Michael was just responding to her, and I thought that somehow, you know, they'd be sneaking off into the jungle, you know, doing whatever they did, and then, you know, that he and Jin were gonna be just adversarial throughout the whole thing. And so I had no idea that it was gonna go this route, that they were gonna- and, you know, every time you saw the two of them together, one of them was beating the other one's behind, like he's trying to drown me, I'm trying to punch his brains out, like there was always so much stuff, so I did not picture that it was gonna go this way.

[clip of Michael talking to Eko and Jin in "...And Found"]

Harold Perrineau: Daniel Dae Kim and I became good friends off screen because- and maybe this is why like I'm just a New Yorker at heart, I just respond to people like that. And Daniel was trained here in New York as an actor, worked here as an actor, and so a lot of our sensibilities were the same. And we also both- our families came over, his sons and wife came over, and my daughter, and so then the kids started playing together, and our wives suddenly became really good friends, and he and I just had a really easy way of working, and we also had- we had this thing that we had to do that was very similar to Oz. The reason we all became good friends on Oz is because we had to be really mean to each other a lot often. And so you have to really trust the other actors to go as far as you can go to make it really believable, but you have to trust the other actors, and they have to trust you that, you know, if I'm swinging an axe in front of your face, you should certainly trust that I'm not gonna- one of those actors who's gonna actually cut you because, you know, I was in the moment.

[clip of Michael talking to Jin in "House of the Rising Sun"]

Harold Perrineau: That sort of formed a fast friendship for us, and now we live really close to each other, and, you know, we go swim at his pool, and they hang out at our house, and so yeah, we've become good friends. And now we've become good friends on the Island, which is really kind of cool too, and I can't tell if that's, you know, art imitating life or life imitating art, but it gives it a chance to have more depth and more levels because we really trust each other, and then when we get to places where we like each other, that we actually get to pull from a really genuine place, like- 'cause we really really do. And so then sort of hopefully, it fills it out in a way that maybe you can't always see, but you can feel that it fills it out that we really do like each other a lot.

Kris White: It's been a while since Harold has had to swing an axe in someone's face or do anything really violent, until now. Here's a clip from this week's episode, "The Hunting Party."

[clip of Michael telling Jack that he's going after Walt in "The Hunting Party"]

Kris White: "The Hunting Party" airs this Wednesday, from 9 to 10 Eastern on ABC. For more insights into this week's episode, as well as an analysis of "The 23rd Psalm," we once again turn to executive producers Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse.

Carlton Cuse: Hello. Welcome to our podcast. We are going to talk today about... uh, we're gonna hash a little bit about "The 23rd Psalm," and then we're gonna talk about "The Hunting Party," which is this week's episode coming up on Lost. So, "The 23rd Psalm", it's played-

Damon Lindelof: I wanna- What is- We're gonna hash? What does that mean, we're gonna hash?

Damon Lindelof: We love that guy. He's very intense, and I think he did a beautiful job in his performance, and hopefully, you know, people were genuinely surprised by what we revealed, you know, Eko's story is because he-

Carlton Cuse: So anyway, one of the things that we wanted to do in that episode was answer the question about the plane. I mean, as we kind of go downstream, we're very conscious of the fact that yes, we have these sort of larger mysteries that we can't really answer anytime soon or the show would be over, but there are the sort of smaller, more transitory mysteries and story points that we are trying to provide answers to as we go along. We, for instance, you know, "What Kate Did," we, you know, finally explained what the crime was that turned her into a fugitive, and in this week's episode, we wanted to- we basically set up the plane last year just for this payoff. I mean, we knew that we were going to tell this story which was going to ultimately explain why that drug plane was on the island, and uh...

Damon Lindelof: Yeah, this is a case of sort of like the long- you know, when Locke and Boone first find that priest, and the priest has a gun on him, and then they find the Virgin Mary statues with the drugs in it. We basically had this story cooked from a long time ago and basically said the only way that we can ever tell this story of the drug plane is that it coincides with one of the characters' flashbacks, and what if that character was one of the tail section people we're gonna be introducing next year, and what if that guy was a, you know, essentially a bad guy who was forced to disguise himself as a priest, and how would that come about, and could he now be presenting himself as a priest. And so these are conversations that literally started last January and have now actually aired this January, which is always very exciting for us as storytellers to say, "Whew!" You know, we-

Carlton Cuse: A year sort of in the planning and execution to get that arc, but I think that, you know, ultimately we hope it was satisfying for you guys to sort of see that, and it was a story that, you know, we cared a lot about and we, you know, we ourselves were very emotionally moved by Adewale's performance, and, you know, it was a really fun one to do. And of course, you know, kind of last week we started talking about the Monster, and now you've seen the latest incarnation of the Monster and... All those flashes, Damon, do you want to make any comment about uh...

Damon Lindelof: Yeah, it's kinda interesting. They're very short and very brief and sort of- I think- I will sort of leave to the audience to sort of interpret what they will but it- I would- My own interpretation, Carlton, would be that, you know, that all the- the thing that all the flashes had in common was they seemed to be, you know, moments from Mr. Eko's life.

Damon Lindelof: In season 1. That would be, I don't know, just my theory.

Carlton Cuse: And you know what, I would put a little bit of credence to a lot of that speculation. I think that that's, you know, the Monster obviously, you know, might be reacting to certain aspects of the character that he is facing.

Damon Lindelof: That's another podcast entirely. Um, in any case, this week's episode is "The Hunting Party," and what we think is- a script written by Elizabeth Sarnoff and Christina Kim, her- Christina, her first script for Lost.

Damon Lindelof: Yes. And Liz wrote "Abandoned," which is the episode in which Shannon left us. And we love this episode. It's going to be a Jack flashback story, which is going to tell a very important part of his life. When last we left Jack's story, you know, we know that he married Sarah last season, and this season we discovered the story of how they met.

Carlton Cuse: And we also discovered that Jack was no longer married. I mean-

Damon Lindelof: "No answering this week, let's just have people tromping through the jungle for no reason and show the Monster, that'll distract them." I want to know what happened between Jack and Sarah.

Damon Lindelof: I think what's also cool though potentially about this episode is that, you know, after sort of spending the first part of the season meeting these new characters from the tail section, that we're back with sort of our hero characters.

Carlton Cuse: And you know, we really do feel like in some ways, those characters have been neglected because of, you know, the new characters we've introduced and just sort of dealing with all the narrative that came out of the end of last season sort of resolving the tail section guys and our guys washing up on the far side of the Island and dealing with the repercussions of what was in the hatch. And now we're finally into a run of episodes that is gonna feature a lot of our main fuselage characters that haven't had as much screen time this year as we would like. So we're kind of excited about this next bunch of episodes, and you will see a lot of your favorite original Lost characters in action.

Damon Lindelof: I'm also kind of interested, Carlton, it seems like Michael has been sort of IMing with Walt over that computer down there in the hatch and-

Damon Lindelof: I would say that uh... boy, that's like- that's one of those tricky sort of F. Lee Bailey questions that by answering it, I am in fact admitting to the fact that the Island is invisible.

Damon Lindelof: Oh, I- that- well, that would- I would love to answer that one too, Carlton, but in answering that question, I would have to tell you that Jack's tattoo means something.

Carlton Cuse: I really want to know what that mark stands for on the shark's tail.

Damon Lindelof: Now there's a question that I can answer. It is in fact the DHARMA Initiative logo, and how it got onto a shark is a question sort of wrapped into the invisibility- alleged indivis- invis- or indivisibility of the Island.

Carlton Cuse: Here we have another one, "Another week, still no birds on the Island." [laughs]

Damon Lindelof: Still no birds. Keep your eyes peeled for birds. Can I ask you a question, Carlton?

Damon Lindelof: Carlton, "Will there eventually be episodes where characters that we have not been introduced to yet, such as Janelle, will come into play and we will see some flashbacks about them. I ask with hope of learning about all 48 survivors of the middle section of Oceanic Flight 815."

Damon Lindelof: Well, that to me is the real intriguing part of BalloonaticUno's question because if there's one question that I've asked time and time again is: Can we learn more about Janelle? What makes Janelle tick? Who is Janelle? What does Janelle look like? Why have I never heard of Janelle?

Carlton Cuse: Janelle is my favorite Lost character, and even though Damon doesn't know anything about Janelle yet, Janelle will be an extremely important part of Seasons 3 through 6 and ultimately will rise to become the ruler of the Island and all of the surrounding kingdoms.

Damon Lindelof: Believe it or not, I think Janelle might be referred to in a line of dialogue on the show, like it's one of those lines where it's like, "Get Scott and Janelle," you know-

Carlton Cuse: Why did you stop showing Lost in India, and when will you start showing it again? I am eagerly waiting to watch it. Please let me know the new timing, and will you air it again on Star?

Damon Lindelof: I think that's an excellent question, Carlton, and, you know, I did not make any personal decision to stop showing Lost in India. I can only assume that Season 2 will soon begin there. Season 1 is completed, and I would hope that if it was successful in India, um, the beautiful thing about Lost is it does have sort of an international flavor to it, and apparently it does well all across the globe, but as to India, stay tuned, I'm sure we'll be back.

Carlton Cuse: And speaking of being back, we'll be back with you again soon for another podcast.

Kris White: That brings us to the end of another podcast. However, we will be back next week with more fun and more interviews. In the mean time, be sure to check out lost.abc.com to submit your own fan questions and check out additional exclusive content.